A storage strategy considering characteristics of video objects on Video-On-Demand storage servers

One of the most important goals of VOD servers is to provide maximum users with retrieval services concurrently. To approach the goal, it is necessary to use an efficient storage strategy that can place video objects on the storage media efficiently and retrieve them more rapidly. However, occasionally, to emphasise retrieval efficiency makes reliability insufficient. On the VOD server, trivial errors may be ignored, however some fatal errors may damage systems. So, it is necessary for storage servers to manage parity information like RAID. The authors propose a novel storage strategy to provide both higher retrieval efficiency and reliability. In particular, the strategy is designed to fully utilize the I/O bandwidth of disks and characteristics of video objects to be stored, so that it provides high retrieval performance. Also, it has an efficient architecture of storage system to allow it to manage parity information. Lastly, we simulate our strategy and conventional strategies through various experiments and evaluate the number of supportable video streams. In these experiments, we show that our strategy performs better than others.